While\nthis was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm,\nthere wasn\u2019t much in it that I would truly consider \u201ccrazy\u201d even\nthough one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined\nthe phrase \u201ccrazy wisdom\u201d in the West. Much of the \u201ccrazy\u201d\nparts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect between East and West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps\nit\u2019s because I\u2019m pretty liberal and into philosophy, and had to read a lot of\nNietzsche in the past, but a lot of the ideas behind Buddhism in the lecture\ngiven made sense to me, and didn\u2019t seem crazy at all (e.g. that the \u201cself\ndoesn\u2019t exist the way it appears\u201d \u2013 that nothing really exists simply as\nit appears on the surface, and that everything, even negative\/harmful emotions\ncan be harnessed for the benefit of others and transmuted into a positive\/constructive\nforce if done correctly and one has the knowledge and skill to do such a thing.\nAnger for the sake of anger doesn\u2019t get anything done, and only leads to more\nanger, for example). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\nwere one or two individuals that were eyebrow raising in their level of inappropriate\nbehavior and general \u201ccraziness\u201d (probably because of near perpetual\nintoxication, since most \u201c), but for most<\/em>\nof the lecture I felt that the \u201cCrazy Wisdom\u201d aspect of the lecture\nwas more of a cultural disconnect than anything else. To Westerners, a lot of\nEast\/Southeast Asian cultural norms seem \u201ccrazy\u201d and \u201cweird\u201d\nbut mostly because their cultural norms aren\u2019t Western cultural norms and most everyday\npeople\u2019s kneejerk reaction is to go \u201cThat\u2019s so crazy\/weird\u201d when\nencountering something from another culture that\u2019s different than our own. If\nyou were to take a step back and think about it, consider it from another person\u2019s\nperspective\/culture, then perhaps you wouldn\u2019t think it so crazy at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside\nof only a handful of individual practitioners\/leaders, who seemed to be\noutliers and eccentrics, they seemed very not-crazy at all. Normal by their own\nculture\u2019s standards. Trying to normalize them Western standards would be ignorant\nat best and racist at worst \u2013 eccentric outliers not considered. \n\nHirshberg\u2019s\nlecture was fascinating and enlightening \u2013 and I don\u2019t think I could consider practitioners\nof the iconoclastic Tibetan Buddhism as crazy. It\u2019s simply a different\nreligious culture than I\u2019m used to seeing, and while I\u2019m ignorant on a great\nmany things, I\u2019m not ignorant enough to write them off as certifiably insane. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While this was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm, there wasn\u2019t much in it that I would truly consider \u201ccrazy\u201d even though one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined the phrase \u201ccrazy wisdom\u201d in the West. Much of the \u201ccrazy\u201d parts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect … Continue reading “Smith’s Response to Hirshberg’s “Crazy Wisdom? Enlightened Iconoclasm in Tibet, Guru Sex Scandals in the West””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[48,33],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cpr-series-mad-lectures","tag-section-02"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-kc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}